


Love is in the soup

by ApocalypseThen



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/M, Feelings Realization, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-14 16:02:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16495802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ApocalypseThen/pseuds/ApocalypseThen
Summary: When Garrus starts acting all weird on shore leave, Shepard is left to figure out why, and what it really means.





	Love is in the soup

**Author's Note:**

> For a kmeme prompt:  
> http://masseffectkink.dreamwidth.org/9443.html?thread=47527395#cmt47527395
> 
> and also inspired by this prompt too:
> 
> https://masseffectkink.livejournal.com/9115.html?thread=43827611#t43827611

"Son of a bitch!" He was suddenly at the railing, their conversation forgotten. He growled and grabbed the metal handrail, hard enough that she heard the metal squeal under his claws. "Come back here and say that!" he shouted across the water.

Shepard came to the rail, but kept beyond his reach. "Easy there, big guy." His mood had turned on a dime. She looked out over the water. There was nobody there. She looked over her shoulder in embarrassment. There were a couple of curious looks from passing pedestrians, and one hard stare. She glared back. "Can I help you?"

The turian looked away abruptly. "Excuse me." He walked off briskly.

"Shepard, I... what were we talking about?" Garrus was back at her side, like nothing had happened. "Oh, yes, Christmas. What is it, exactly? I hear food is involved somehow."

The rest of their promenade was uneventful apart from a brief episode near the end. Garrus stood still and glared out over the water again, his hands clenching and unclenching.

Shepard figured he had some anger issues. Perhaps being back on the Citadel was dredging up a few memories. Garrus hadn't struck her as the paranoid or insecure type, though. As far as she could tell he was a pragmatist through and through, not the kind of guy to be second-guessing himself all the time.

She realised that was a human way of looking at things. She hadn't spent off-duty time with many turians. Maybe they were all a little bit off. Ranting at invisible ghosts might be just another aspect of turian culture she hadn't heard of. Like that thing where they fucked before fighting. Duh. Everyone knew afterwards was the best time.

They went their separate ways at the arcade. Garrus had the gleam in his eye that she'd learned meant he'd picked up enough credits for an upgrade. She wanted to soak up a little normality, not tag along as he trawled the shops. She headed for a café with a view.

"Excuse me."

Shepard blinked up into the shadow that had fallen across her table. She recognised the turian with the hard stare from earlier. His clothes said civilian but his bearing was anything but. She locked eyes with him.

He took a step back and held his hands away from his sides in a placatory gesture. "Sorry to disturb you. I would have approached your friend, but he seems occupied. I couldn't help wondering. Is he new to the Presidium?"

Shepard relaxed just a notch. "It's not his first walk in the park."

"But perhaps he hasn't been for a while, yes?"

"What's it to you?" Shepard wasn't about to give an inch while this turian talked around the houses.

"I shouldn't really say... we don't want you humans to feel... well, it's not my place...Sorry. Could you tell him...no, give him this. That'll work." He dropped a small datachip on the table and hurried off.

"What the hell?" Shepard asked his retreating back. She looked at the chip in her hand. She had her omni-tool scan it. No red flags. Just code.

Curiosity got the better of her at the bottom of her second latte. She paid her tab and ambled back to the promenade. This was where Garrus had been about to blow his lid again, but had just about managed to keep himself under control. She booted the datachip to her omnitool.

Nothing happened. She gazed out over the water for a while. "Stupid weird turians." She turned and collided neatly with Garrus.

"Pillow-y."

"What?" They stepped apart.

"Uh, sorry, Shepard, I shouldn't have snuck up on you like that."

"No, you said..." She looked up at him. He was clueless. She faltered.

Then suddenly he was enraged again, for all of a moment. "Fibrous? Face me, damn your fibrous... ah, sorry. Sorry." His venom was directed across the water, but his apology was to her.

"Stop apologising, Garrus. Better yet, stop acting weird." She could have been more sympathetic. But she'd just bounced right off a turian. Even in civvies he felt like he was made entirely of elbows. She was gonna have a bruise.

"Ma'am, yes, ma'am."

He never called her anything but 'Shepard'. She frowned. Was he mocking her now? "We should go."

"Uh, OK. Shepard." His head swivelled around for one final glare over the calm waters.

It wasn't until they were back on the Normandy that Shepard put one and one together. She scrolled back through the public extranet files on the Presidium gardens. "Earth fish, Thessian fish, every damn kind of fish," she muttered. "Trees and bushes and cacti, oh my."

"Bees, wasps and turian hornets." This last looked like a small jetfighter and purred like a kitten. Why would they ever bring them aboard a controlled environment?

"Snips, snails, puppy dog tails," she mumbled as she hunted through edition after edition of Avina's Announcements.

"Eagles and seagulls and... fuck a duck?" The year-old article announced proudly that after protracted negotiations, the human delegation would be allowed to introduce a small colony of ducks to the Presidium waters. The stubborn objections of the turian embassy had eventually been withdrawn, for no apparent reason. Shepard smelled a rat.

Yeah, there had been some birds around that afternoon. Ducks? Maybe. Shepard couldn't recall clearly. When you walked the Presidium you trusted that Avina wouldn't let the fauna crap all over your dress uniform. If there had been any, they hadn't been obvious.

She idly looked up the encyclopaedia entry on turian hearing and promptly lost herself in all the pretty sketches. The turian solution to the sound-wave problem resembled a set of fractally compact tuning forks lining a spiral cavity. She wouldn't be sticking her tongue in a turian ear any time soon.

Now where had _that_ thought come from?

She pulled herself together. Focus. Ducks, calls (mating), calls (other). Cross-reference turians. Spectral analysis of auditory profiles. Range, sensitivity. Overlap. Yes! Turians could hear ducks.

Great work, Shepper, she scolded herself. So turians can hear ducks. Big whoop.

She played back some duck recordings. Silence. What? She was pretty sure humans could hear ducks. They were an Earth animal, weren't they? OK, she grew up in space, she'd never actually _seen_ one, but... _Quack quack, get out of here?_ A half-remembered line from a nursery rhyme popped into her head. Did only children hear them?

She checked the settings on her tablet. She played some other stuff. Her sound system worked fine. She found footage of a noisy park with a flock of ducks landing in the water feature. The ambient noise came through. The ducks landed in eerie silence, like a wing of bombers splashing down.

Shepard spent a little time in a martial reverie, checking out stealth aircraft. With the exception of one impractical-looking salarian prototype, none of them flapped.

Frustrated, she paced the room. Suddenly the ducks were in full quack, sniping and croaking at each other as they fought over mates. She came back to the desk. The ducks went quiet.

By a process of elimination, she figured out her omnitool was doing it. That would teach her to load strange turian code into her rig. She dug around. The upgrade had snuck a module into her translation package. It looked easy enough to disable. She toggled it off and on a few times. The ducks parped indignantly in sync.

"Fuck. A. Duck." Shepard announced to her cabin. "What the fuck is with turians and ducks?" To that question, the extranet had no good answer. She turned in.

Garrus the angry waterfowl loomed over her, but she couldn't understand his silent appeals or his frustrated flapping.

Shepard woke up less than perfectly rested. Her hair wasn't cooperating. She couldn't face corralling it before breakfast.

The mess was heaving. "Muffin, Skipper?" "Cat drag you out of bed, Shepard?" "Good morning, Commander." "Red red red _alert_."

Shepard snapped her head up to find Garrus looking at her. "Shepard." He nodded politely.

He was looking more around her than at her. She was suddenly self-conscious of her halo of curls. "I should..."

"Don't go."

"...go." She looked quizzically at Garrus. She could have sworn he hadn't moved his mouth. Weird. When she first met a turian she couldn't get over how static and expressionless their faces were. How rigidly their jaws flapped. Since then she'd learned to pay attention to the subtle movements of their mandibles, to their body language as a whole. The way a turian held his hips could tell you a lot. Along with a decent translation package it made an empathic connection possible. She'd met one or two turians who'd tried to speak to her without a translator. Not having lips made human speech... challenging. But at least their mouths opened and closed approximately when they were making noise.

Then again, maybe not having lips meant that turians didn't really need to move their mouth to speak? She shut her cabin door behind her and dove back into the extranet. Turian ventriloquy... fascinating... scenes recreated from turian history... the emperor betrayed by his wife and his vizier and... and now they fuck? She clicked back out in a hurry and tried a more science-y thread. Ventriloquy developed as part of hunting... turned into a spiritual part of the ritual hunt... not practised any more except in really remote areas... and then it turns into an orgy?

Navigating the fringes of the alien reaches of the extranet, it was difficult to be sure, but she go the feeling that she was nibbling at the edges of a rich vein of niche pornography. Ventriloquy as kink? She didn't quite know what to make of that. Jeez, what was he... wait, was _she_...? Man, you'd have to be _really_ flexible to get your legs over _that_.

Shepard suddenly remembered that her extranet activity was very likely to be monitored. She shut her terminal down in a hurry and couldn't stop herself from glancing around the room for witnesses. "Pffff. Your mom's not going to come in without knocking, Shepper," she told herself in a goofy voice.

Little bastard ducks, making her crazy. Holing up in her cabin, surfing the extranet. She was sick of herself already. Maybe it was just one of the (many) side-effects of surviving a suicide mission. She was surprised the crew was holding up quite so well, without an immediate sense of purpose. She'd have expected a few more flare-ups.

Frankly, though, the crew was a bunch of weirdos and misfits at the best of times. 'Duck tales' probably didn't even register on any of their personal strange-o-meters.

She decided wasn't going to blab about it, not even to Mordin. Nobody likes a skipper who hears voices. She imagined explaining to the crew, no it was that she specifically _didn't_ hear voices, specifically ducks! That'd go down like a lead balloon.

 _Fucking_ ducks. Her hand hesitated over her tablet. It would be out there, she was sure. She just had to launch the search, and she would find it. All the filthy duck/turian porno a girl could eat...

The extranet was so advanced these days that just searching for porn _would cause the porn to come into existence_. VI-enhanced motion capture and storyboarding could spin an idle search history into a devastatingly personalised teaser-trailer in less time than it took you to spread open your account details. They would have banned that shit if they could. It was just another thing you had to deal with online, like Batarian Prisoner spam.

Shepard's resolve hardened. She dropped her tablet on the desk and set her shoulders to action stations. She clumped to the door of her cabin, standing taller with every stride, until by the time the door slid open she was once again Commander Shepard, Saviour of the Citadel, Collector of The Collectors, Spectre of the Council, Kicker Of Variously Shaped Asses Including Functionally Equivalent Parts Of Creatures That Had No Recognisable Ass, Taker Of Names...

Garrus' fist was raised in loyal salute. "So _fast_..." he said without moving his lips. He stumbled back a step.

"Uh, Shepard," he began, "I was wondering..."

Shepard's eyes flicked up to meet his. "No time, Garrus. Get your gun."

That was an order he didn't need to think about. "Aye-aye, ma'am."

Then they rode down in the elevator together. Shepard could feel him sneaking a glance at her. She stared straight ahead. She didn't want to lose her focus.

"Stiff."

Shepard blushed. Now she was thinking about turian genitalia. She couldn't look at him. She wasn't sure if her face would give her away.

"Shepard?"

"Garrus?"

"You look, ah, a bit stiff? Like that time we went to dinner with your mother?"

Shepard realised that unless she was looking right at him, it was impossible to tell if he had opened his mouth or not when he said something. The translator module didn't have a special setting for 'sexy turian subsonic flirting', it just piped everything straight through in the same attractive baritone buzz that set her belly on fire...

Ohhhhhhh boy.

"Boy?" His head tilted in that birdlike way she found kind of funny.

"Did I say that out loud?" Shepard was almost relieved. Now she had a reason to blush. Plain old social awkwardness. You usually learned to skip over it around aliens. Who had the time for all the cultural niceties in a firefight? But there was something about goddamn elevators that brought it all up to the surface, where here surface meant her pale freckled cheeks that betrayed her every time she had a feeling more serious than hunger. Hell, even that last hamburger, at that place in the Wards, with the pickles and the hot sauce? Just thinking about it right now was making her cheeks burn a deeper red.

So it was fair enough, right? She wore her heart on her sleeve, it was just levelling the playing field if she could literally hear his subconscious thoughts and desires. She didn't have to tell him about the translator package. He didn't have to know and there was no way he would find out. Unless they went back to the Presidium _a lot_ , where he'd eventually figure it out, or some _helpful, concerned_ turian would give the game away and ruin their perfect romance...

This time she bit her tongue instead of saying it out loud. Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy. Stupid stupid stupid Shepper. Didn't see what was right in front of your nose. Maybe it did make more sense to hump before the fight. That way you wouldn't have any regrets. Her eyes watered.

"Uh, Shepard...?"

The elevator had finally reached its destination.

"Garrus?" She didn't step out just yet.

"What are we...?" he said. "Follow you anywhere."

That last part, she assumed without looking, without moving his lips.

"Hunting," she said.

"Hunting what?" "By your side."

"Ducks."

She took his hand and led him away.

**Author's Note:**

> And later, they had soup.
> 
> Duck soup.


End file.
